Songfacts®:

• Is "Double Dare" addressing us, a stranger, or Bauhaus themselves? We can't be sure, but the song's message is loud and clear: be bold and speak truth to power. "Double Dare" is a call to stand up and speak our minds, no matter how frightening it might be.
• The song is part of the first Bauhaus album, In The Flat Field. The group's guitarist Daniel Ash told Songfacts the legendary British DJ John Peel was so darn good, he created problems with the album release. "We actually recorded that for a John Peel session with five other tracks, so you had to work really quickly," Ash said. "And as was often the case with the John Peel sessions, his sessions would sound better than the actual song that was released by the band on their own albums."
  
  The band tried to re-record the song but couldn't get it to Peel level, so they delayed release in order to acquire permissions through the BBC. The Musicians Union tried to stop the application, and things didn't get cleared up for over a month.
• Usage of the term "double dare" goes back at least as far as 1896. It was originally a "double black dog dare" (the progression went from "dare" to "black dog dare" to "double black dog dare").